Voting Wrongs

09/21/2012 11:27 pm ET
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Updated
Nov 21, 2012

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Elizabeth Drew
The New York Review Of Books

The Republicans' plan is that if they can't buy the 2012 election they will steal it.

The plan, long in the making and now well into its execution, is to raise great gobs of money--in newly limitless amounts--so that they and their allies could outspend the president's forces; and they would also place obstacles in the way of large swaths of citizens who traditionally support the Democrats and want to exercise their right to vote. The plan would disproportionately affect blacks, who were guaranteed the right to vote in 1870 by the Fifteenth Amendment; but then that right was negated by southern state legislatures; and after people marched, were beaten, and died in the civil rights movement, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now various state legislatures are coming up with new ways to try once again to nullify that right.